


the road not taken

by franzferdinand



Category: The Odyssey - Homer, Ulysses Dies at Dawn - The Mechanisms (Album)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Gen, Mythology - Freeform, how on EARTH am i to tag this, i stole bits and pieces from myth and from udad and i put em in a fic and that's that babes, i tempered some of udad's sci-fi elements, odysseus needs some therapy lmao, that album is a masterpiece, the gods are among us my friends, they have depression and chemical addictions, this is kind of a retelling of the odyssey if that helps
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-27 10:13:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30121185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/franzferdinand/pseuds/franzferdinand
Summary: “Son of Laertes!” he calls, and Odysseus fights back a flinch. “Surely you must know better than any of us what happened at Troy, eh? Why don’t you regale us with the story of when the walls fell? And after, too, man, we’d all love to know what happened to you! Fell off the face of the planet, you did.”There are shouts of agreement from the crowd, brays for a story. Men start their own accounts with stammering flourishes, only to be shouted down by their friends, who are certain that their version is correct, that they know what it was that turned Ilium, high Ilium, into an abattoir in a matter of days. Odysseus does not quiet them; he knows Alcinous will. The man obliges with a shout, and he lets himself smile. His false smiles are better than the king’s.“Of the fall of Troy there is not much to tell."
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	the road not taken

Odysseus wakes to the sound of Trojan screams echoing in his ears. Not that he had ever actually heard them; the thick walls of Ilium had been more than enough to block out the sound of the blood-soaked revelry. The cameras streaming it all had worked, and his imagination could do more than enough to fill in the gaps. 

Odysseus wakes alone and in the dark. His heart pounds, thrumming through his fingers as he sits up and takes a deep drink of whatever was in the bottle on his nightstand; not water, but beyond that he can’t tell. He is drenched in sweat.

Odysseus wakes to the sound of sirens. Outside, something wails, a child or a policeman or some pile of metal still calling itself a building collapsing, shrieking against its neighbors. Below him in the main room at Calypso’s wafts bar chatter and the occasional piercing moan, cutting through the haze still clinging to his temples. 

Odysseus wakes.

When his hands stop shaking, he stands. When his legs stop shaking, he walks. The cigarette smoke from the bar downstairs drifts up to meet him, carrying the sound of squealing voices with it. It must be evening, then. The room is hazy, thick bands of wires like vines hanging from the ceiling. A thick perfume lies over it all, something floral and artificial. 

Calypso is there too, her eyes trailing across the screens behind the bar as she shines a dirty glass with a dirtier rag. A tired newscast plays: looks like the Sphinx virus is still ravaging the warrens all over the planet. That motherfucker Oedipus must have his hands full with it, high-tech medical equipment or not. Not a war he would like to be fighting.

Her magnetic eyes find Odysseus like North. She is a demi-god in her own right, pays her bills to Dionysus for the space and the supplies and the relative safety. She is a witch who ensnares the innocent. She pours her drinks with a heavy hand. He thinks of Penelope and fights the urge to whisper a prayer to whatever Olympian would hear him. There is no use anyway: her god is closer than any of his. 

“Ulysses!” She calls, just to annoy him. “The usual?”

By the time he reaches the bar, still silent, she has placed a fifth of whisky onto it, a smile playing about her features. He takes a long look at her. She is beautiful, of course. She has always been beautiful. There is something unnatural about her beauty, about the way her skin pulls tight across her jaw, her cheeks. Her longevity has come cheap, nothing near the flawless immortality the Olympians can afford. The work is not enough to hide her natural luster. 

He takes the bottle and nods at her. She will want to talk, and he is in no position to deny her. She lets him stay, after all. 

“You look tired.”

“I am.”

She laughs like bells, and takes the bottle once he’s taken off the cap. When he gets it back it smells like her, distinct enough even in the pungent room. The taste is enough to get rid of it. 

“You’ve got to let me make an introduction, Odysseus,” Calypso coos, watching his throat work around it. “I know he’d love you. You’re clever like he is. You could work something out. Live forever, baby, with me.” 

It’s enough to make him smile. He takes another drink. 

“I don’t think I’m cut out for immortality, Cal,” he says, “and I don’t think I’d want it anyway.” 

The sigh she gives is a cursory one. They have done this dance before, sung this duet. She waves him away with an elegant shake of her hand, so out of place here. Nymph, he thinks, goddess, and his grip tightens. He taps the beats of his wife’s name on the neck of the bottle as he makes his way over to his usual booth. It is, as always, empty. There is no one left for him here. 

It makes a bit of a clatter when the god walks in. 

The room seems to get a little brighter, a little hotter. The man is thin, almost waifish, but not starving like those who live on the lower levels are. He is, in a word, beautiful. His hair shines under the shoddy bar lights, his teeth flash when he smiles at Calypso, his eyes are an ever-shifting color. This man has been alive longer than any of them, longer than them all put together, maybe, and he looks twenty-five at the oldest. This is the man responsible for the final downfall of the surveillance program Argus, which had absorbed and observed the whole planet at its height. A hundred million eyes, all shut because of his quick thinking and clever fingers.

They all know that it is Hermes. 

Though the bar is at the far end of the room by the door, Hermes seems to arrive there before the stink of outside is finished gusting inside. He leans on the bar and it stiffens as though to please him.

“Hello,” the giant-killer says, and how could clever Odysseus ever have heard bells in Calypso’s throat when there are voices like that? 

“Hermes,” she replies, tight as a bowstring. “It’s been a while.”

The Olympian has no time for pleasantries. Or maybe he just hates being in the bar. “Nausicaa is coming to retrieve Odysseus. You’re expected to release him.” 

She does not get a word in edgewise. She wants to. 

“She’ll be here soon. Zeus had me give you word.” 

It is all he needs to say and he knows it. He is out of the door like there are wings at his heels, leaving that distinct smell of nectar and ambrosia that Odysseus bets only he and Calypso would recognize. The scent of the Olympians, the scent of that technology that allows them to live forever, lords over this damned planet-city. 

In the vacuum created by the god’s absence, the brief gap in mutterings in which all that can be heard is the tune crawling out of the radio, Odysseus thinks. It has been a while for him, too. The last time Zeus turned that mighty gaze upon him was seven years ago, the final straw that had killed the last of his men and had washed him up here. It seems he is being retrieved. He starts drinking faster.

Calypso sits down across from him once the smell of nectar has finally gone. 

“You heard him,” he says while she takes a breath to speak. “I don’t think either of us have much of a choice.” 

“I know.”

“If Zeus is asking, that means good Pallas Athena is too. I have a bad feeling she wants something from me.” 

Calypso’s eyes are like glass as she watches him. “You’ve done enough.”

“It’ll never be enough for them. You know that.” 

She sighs again, a real one this time. She finishes his bottle for him. “It should be. It isn’t, but it should be. Everything you didn’t lose at Troy they took from you. I think you’ve done more than enough, for them and for Ithaca.” 

“I know,” he says. 

“I love you.” 

“I know.” 

She has brought a second bottle with her. This time it is wine, bitter and dark. They drink until Nausicaa arrives.

Calypso leaves like a ghost, the veil of her hair swishing behind her. When he leaves this place for good, he does not look back. The bottle he takes with him, and when he’s out in front of the building, he pours the rest of it on the ground for her. A libation. A blessing. An apology, of sorts. 

Nausicaa is young, but in a way that is really young, not the bought-and-paid-for youth of the Olympians. Her hair is long, a braided coil over one shoulder, and her clothes are functional yet finely made. When she gets close enough to shake his hand, he smells detergent. This, then, is Alcinous’ daughter.

She chatters as they walk out, both appropriately respectful and inappropriately chipper for the situation. She leads him to a small transport, barely a raft, and climbs into the pilot’s chair. Odysseus takes one last look about him at Ogygia before he leaves. He has done so much leaving, but he does not think he will regret it for this place. Of all the parts of the city, this might be his least favorite. It is not the worst, not the most dangerous, not even the dirtiest, but it is the kind of place that men enter but do not leave. It is not a surprise that only the will of an Olympian could finally tear him away.

“I’m taking you to Scherie,” she says, as the transport kicks off the makeshift dock in front of Calypso’s. There is that expected feeling of his stomach dropping, the harsh press back into his seat as she pulls up, guiding them through the bowels of the city.

Odysseus keeps his eyes open as they go. It is an old habit; one he does not want to shake. He watches the buildings fly past, the billboards, the creaking facades, and tries to imagine what it was like before. Legend has it that once upon a time, the planet was made of dirt and stone and water, and the city was only a spot upon it. The city grew slowly, like a cancer, across the land, absorbing all other towns and cities into itself, until there was no land left. It spread across the sea, too, heedless of what once had been an insurmountable obstacle. It grew upwards like a weed until there was no sky left, until the upper reaches scraped the stars. And it burrowed inwards like a parasite, until all that was left of the planet was the city, and no land or sea or sky or ground was left. People lived and died, spent generations in the burrows, and they never saw the sky.

Odysseus had seen the sky. Were the transport to crash into the wall right now, leave him and Nausicaa nothing but a red smear, at least he had seen the sky. 

“Phaeacia?” He asks, after a too-long silence. 

“If you like.” She looks at him and smiles. “My father is going to help you get back to Ithaca.”

Odysseus nods slowly, his eyes still ever-roving. “Why?” 

The question does not faze her. “He wants to.” 

“What else does your father want?” 

She grins. “Many-turned indeed. He wants your story. He wants to hear about what happened after Troy. After the horse.” 

“Do you?”

She sweeps higher, but the city is still wine-dark around them. “I’ll be there.” 

The exchange quiets her. They do not speak again until they reach Scherie. 

By the time they reach her father’s house, the floodlights are shining rosy-fingered through the depths, a false dawn over a false sea. The house is large, several layers above the dingy corner that Calypso’s is tucked into. Circular steel beams rise from floor to ceiling like columns, a mass of wire-flowers wrapped around the top. He sees people milling about the entrance, talking and laughing distantly, and his stomach drops once more. He had been afraid of this. 

This is more than a house. This is her father’s palace, and this is a feast. 

Nausicaa slides the transport into the docking bay beside the palace’s leftmost wing with slightly more force than necessary and climbs out onto the docks. She reaches out a hand to help Odysseus out of his side and he takes it, if only to avoid offending her. A hero he may be, of some kind or another, and heroes need not necessarily be kind, but he tries to. It makes it easier, whether to help someone or to deceive them. He is a man who keeps his options open.

"We have a shower for you, and some clothes," she informs him, pushing through a side door and beckoning him inward. The interior of the house is more lavish than the exterior, showing proudly its deep carpets and plasma screen walls. It would be demure for a younger man and demure for an Olympian: for a man like Alcinous it is a good measure of pride without waste or opulence. Whoever manages his house is doing a very, very good job.

Nausicaa is also quite the achievement. Her speech is careful and measured while still coming across like that of a young woman, her dalliances and uninformed observations. All through the night she has not insulted him once, on accident or on purpose. She has been taught well. 

She does not pawn him off onto a servant, though a few ask as they make their way down the halls. His room is lit a deep blue, and the shower is already running hot when he arrives. Nausicaa leaves him with directions to her father’s hall.

There are clothes folded on the bedspread. Odysseus needs only take one glance at them and know who provided them. They are gray and severe in cut, the dull field broken only by a stylized owl’s face on the left breast. Gray-eyed Athena is claiming him once more, it seems, in front of Alcinous and his court and anyone else who might see fit to visit. It is not a true surprise; she has always been his greatest advocates among the Olympians, the one who beseeched Zeus on his behalf and stayed the angry hands of Poseidon and Apollo when she needed to. 

After he is clean and trimmed, he dresses in the new clothes without a second thought. It is not that his pride is gone, or that he has any particular love for Athena, but they are warm and clean and what Alcinous will expect him to be wearing. For a man still weighing how deeply he plans on disappointing his host, they are a safe bet. 

His memory leads him to the grand hall, Nausicaa’s voice playing over and over again in his head. A part of him wonders if she will still be wearing her sensible traveling clothes, or perhaps something else this time. A greater part recoils at the thought. 

A serving boy runs past him, little feet pattering against the stones. Odysseus must briefly close his eyes to fight back the images that assail him, memories of a swaddled infant. It is senseless and stupid; Telemachus is older than that boy, now, and would bear little resemblance, but even so. There has been much remembering of late, and the cunning Odysseus has never been able to quiet his mind for long. 

When he arrives at the hall, it is as expected. The feast is set. The walls pulse gently with a rainbow light, moving in shifting waves from floor to ceiling. It casts strange shadows on the faces and the clothes of those present, makes their movements like smooth-flowing water. There are chandeliers, unnecessary but beautiful still; strange, curved forms like galaxies moving slowly on their suspensions. There are five great tables in the hall. One is laid perpendicular to the others on its own dais, high elegant chairs all around it, though the rest are by no means crude. Everywhere there is not some gleaming light there is gold, or silver, polish and shine. It glints like fire on every surface, and he fights the urge to squint against it. The flashes follow him up to the grand table, and as he walks amidst the chattering crowd, he gets a good look at what is laid out for their meal. To his surprise there are what looks like meats, real meats, steaming slightly in the stuffy air, roasted and grilled and lathed in spiced sauces. Fruits, doubtless flown in from the outer colonies, peeled and stuffed and cut in strange shapes, delicacies he knew only by name but had never tasted. Nothing looks artificial, nothing reconstituted. There are great bowls of wine, small grids in the floor for when libations are poured, the scent heady and fruity. The smell of the wine is overshadowed, however, by the other offerings being burnt in great braziers along the walls, bones and fat sizzling and crackling under the chatter. The mixture reminds him so much of home, of Ithaca, it burns a hole in his stomach. They have pulled out all the stops for him, or at least found his arrival enough of an excuse to do so for themselves.

A thighbone, wrapped in fat, pops as he walks past, and his eyes stay on it. Their gods are men, or they were once, this is known. And yet still the offerings are burned, yet still men whisper quiet prayers to themselves. The part of men that was made to worship dies a slow and painful death, and even in the city is not dead yet. 

Alcinous greets him with a smile. There are echoes of Nausicaa in him, the line of his nose and slant of his cheeks, but this is clearly a far world-wearier man. He is smiling at Odysseus, though it does not quite reach his sea-blue eyes.

“Ah, finally!” He booms, voice kingly. When he sweeps his arm out to offer Odysseus a seat, his wide sleeve billows, the rings on his fingers glimmer. “Our guest of honor. Please, sit, eat and drink your fill! It has been too long since anyone has seen a victor from Troy in these parts.” 

Odysseus paints on his own smile, spare and slightly embarrassed, as they will expect to see of him. No doubt they have heard the stories of Odysseus, the wanderer, whose travels after the fall of Troy took him everywhere except hearth and home. He sits, glad that there is no chance that the bar-smell is still on him, though the shower can do little to hide the deep lines on his face or the hollows in his cheeks. 

The wine is mixed weak, as it often is at a party one expects to last long into the night. Odysseus does not drink deeply. 

Nausicaa is not there. The time it takes to wonder why she would have chosen to be absent is the time it takes to notice the cameras on the walls, buttonholes nestled in swirls of filigree and the gaps between panels. He hopes she is watching. He hopes she is not.

Alcinous’ attention is already elsewhere, talking to some courtier or another. The men and women around him spin stories of everything and everywhere, of gods and men, and the fearful interactions between. It is only a matter of time before the discussion turns to Troy. To Ilium. The fall of the most well-protected district the city had ever seen and would likely ever see since. The war that was the death of the finest of men the city had ever seen, save present company. 

When the talk starts Odysseus feels his eyes grow misty and must look away. As subtle as he tries to be, Alcinous’ eyes are sharper than he had given credit for. 

“Son of Laertes!” he calls, and Odysseus fights back a flinch. “Surely you must know better than any of us what happened at Troy, eh? Why don’t you regale us with the story of when the walls fell? And after, too, man, we’d all love to know what happened to you! Fell off the face of the planet, you did.”

There are shouts of agreement from the crowd, brays for a story. Men start their own accounts with stammering flourishes, only to be shouted down by their friends, who are certain that their version is correct, that they know what it was that turned Ilium, high Ilium, into an abattoir in a matter of days. Odysseus does not quiet them; he knows Alcinous will. The man obliges with a shout, and he lets himself smile. His false smiles are better than the king’s.

“Of the fall of Troy there is not much to tell,” he starts, and the hush falls deeper. Even a half-drunk crowd of fools knows the onset of a true tale, a song for the ages. They are mistaken. Odysseus does not plan to recite to them an epic. He will tell them a tragedy, and whether they will wisen up to the fact is up, he decides, entirely to them. His patience for men has only grown thinner over time. “The fighting dragged on endlessly, and with neither side gaining any amount of ground. Their walls were too thick, too well-defended for the militia we had assembled to make any difference. Agamemnon, may the gods protect his soul, was not a man of strategy. I proposed that if we could not get the walls down by force, that we try some other way to get through them.” 

Here a wan smile, a knowing look. 

“I proposed peace. An accord between Troy and the rest of the city, offering them freedom from its control, and independence to guard its own desires. It was believable--the best of us were already dead, and though Hector had fallen, Troy still had its damnable walls. Our soldiers left, uprooted our camps, except for those of us who drew up the accords. We signed treaties. It was very, very official. 

Then we commissioned the statue. You all know that once upon a time, those in Ilium bred horses, yes? Fine beasts. None of them still live, but there are plenty of images. We gave to them a fine sleek horse, standing on all four feet. Nothing warlike about it. They scanned it for explosives. For bioweapons. For hidden soldiers. They found nothing. They certainly did not find the faint, almost imperceptible signal that it was emitting, a thing of my own design. Prolonged exposure drove the listener mad.” Another grin, this one a touch more feral. Remind them that Odysseus the drunk, sitting before them, had once been Odysseus the soldier, and part of that man still lived within him. “After a week there was not a thing in Troy not stained red with blood.”

Faint cheers rise from the room. They were good men, raised to know that the scourge in Troy was just that: a scourge, which had taken far too long to eradicate. Before them was the man who managed to do so. They did not see the ghosts on his shoulders, only the honor he had brought himself and his family, his home. Ithaca was a hero’s place, no matter if that hero had managed to return. 

Alcinous claps him on the shoulder and he grins, patting the man’s arm. His mind and body have split by this point, memories of long nights spent in a workshop working desperately to construct the emitter playing over and over even as his body shifts to do what is expected of it. This is a performance, and his grand soliloquy has only just begun.

“What then, man?” Asks a courtier, sat a few seats down from him. “Nobody heard from you for ages. What busied the clever Odysseus?” 

Death. Drinking. Loss, again and again. Failure.

“Many things,” he says. “Many horrible, many wonderful. I saw much of the city in my travels.”

Nobody responds. They are waiting, dogs on the hunt, the jaws of a bear trap. When he looks around, their eyes are bright.

“Well, after we set out from Troy, of course the men wanted to celebrate. Don’t they always.”

He pauses for the expected mutters of agreement, the subtle nods and snorts. Those who dined with Alcinous, he had thought correctly, are used to leadership, and the disappointments that come with it. 

“So, after a brief while, we stopped at a casino. Don’t ask me which; I couldn’t tell you now. A lot of my memory of that place is uncertain--they gave out the lotus flowers, you see.” 

On cue, the crowd murmurs. Most of them have seen someone out of their mind on lotuses, so far gone they forget their goals, their pasts, their names. The first one is always free, but the others seldom are. And there are always others.

“We almost lost a few of them, but thankfully I was able to drag most of them back before it went too far. It was only after that we ran into the Cyclops and ran ourselves afoul of the Earthshaker.”

A sip of wine. 

“The lotus-eaters had shaken us, but we kept going, homeward, trying to keep our transport in order. We were going through a scarcely populated district--warehouses, that sort of thing. Eventually, we were running thin on stores, and our transport was barely limping along as it was. We looked for the most broken-down old warehouse we could find and hoped it would be abandoned. At first, it looked like we were right. There were still some supplies left in it, mostly food, but it was good enough for us. That first night, we dragged ourselves in through the cargo door and made camp best we could. 

The next morning, the Cyclops woke up. 

It was an older model, that much was obvious. Looked like a Polyphemus, maybe, something like that. The old line of guard programs that Poseidon put on all his warehouses. And we’d stumbled into one. It closed the cargo door, obviously, trapped us in there. Before we knew what had happened, those damned crate-movers had grabbed two of the men. Crushed their spines. The rest of us barely had time to hide--it was pure luck that most of its arms weren’t operational anymore. Just as well- I don’t know if anyone has ever told you this, but some of the old Cyclopes had permission to harvest for the Acheron. Now, I think they just integrate what viable organic matter they find into their own processors, but I’m not sure about that Polyphemus. When I’m feeling optimistic, I like to think that they’re truly dead.”

There are more murmurs about the room, eyes darting to one another. They had not expected this, but they were not going to stop him. The Acheron was an uncomfortable subject, and for men such as these it reminded them solely of what their own fates would be, what all their working and striving to become godlike would result in. 

A planet composed mostly of wire and circuits requires a ridiculous amount of computing power. The automated colonies that produced foodstuffs, the robotic cleaners that still ran in the upper levels, the floodlights keeping the interior from being completely lost to darkness, all of it and much more required something capable of keeping it all together. And what more efficient computer than the human brain? Fed a steady stream of something nutritious and kept suitably moist, it was the perfect solution to a processing necessity. The person to have proven this, ages and ages ago, was rich Hades. He started the Acheron. When one died, rather than simply rotting away and going to waste, their brain was harvested, and they were kicked into a half-conscious hell for the rest of eternity. The organic computers keep the whole planet from spinning into what remained of their sun. The Acheron, the most famous, and all the other rivers of Hades. Styx. Cocytus. Phlegethon. Fearful Lethe. In death, even the most worthless might have a use.

When death makes your body and mind forfeit alike, what surprise is it that people might choose to buy immortality? 

“We hid among the crates, trying to keep away from where the camera could see us. Had that damned fish-eye, you know, hanging over everything. It ended up getting two more of us the next time we got out. The only benefit, when trying to get around one of the Cyclopes, friends, is that they can be incredibly myopic. They are open to deception. The next night, I managed to sneak my way to the nearest functioning console using one of the smaller crates and forced my way in with a false login.”

This time, the smile on Odysseus’ face is not a false one. He is proud of that particular turn. 

“I triggered alarms everywhere they could be triggered, then disabled its cameras. The login I’d used combined with a few other tricks meant that all its error messages contained a logic failure, so every time it tried to ask for help, the system would just get more confused. Wouldn’t last forever, of course, and doubtless the thing would try contacting some other authority nearby before too long, but it was long enough for the rest of us to grab what we could and use the crates to sneak out.

By the time we were back on our transport, the thing had gotten its vision back. I might have stayed around a little longer than I should’ve, and it got a good look at us. Poseidon isn’t the type to forgive and forget, not about tampering with his technology, and certainly not about theft.” 

Odysseus leans back and takes in the sight of those watching him once more. They look like children, gormless and bewitched. He feels like an asteroid, blasted by a ceaseless solar wind. Disintegrating. He decides to be drawn into his star, to stop struggling. Someone may as well hear the whole damned thing, before he gets home, before he can finally rest.

“That, of course, was just the beginning.”


End file.
